With the amount of websites, blogs, and forums on the internet these days running Google Adsense, one would think that there must be a tons of money to be made?

Doing a quick search on Google for Adsense will bring up thousands of sites claiming that you can make THOUSANDS of $$$ if you use their magic formula. Ironically most of these claims are through the use of Google Adwords which I’ll get into more detail shortly.

So the first big question, “Can you really make money with Google Adsense?” The short answer is Yes, but I think what most people really want to know is not if you can make money, but can you make a LOT of money with Google Adsense.
The short answer to this…. you will make more money flipping burgers at McDonalds then you will with Google Adsense.

So why are all these sites claiming that you can make thousands of $$$?

Firstly, most of these sites are selling programs, e-books or magic formulas on how to make money with Adsense. If they were really making as much money as they claim then I have to ask 3 questions.

1/ Why do they need to sell books and programs to show you how to do it? Surely if they are making so much money with Adsense they don’t need to waste their time making programs and eBooks?

2/ These programs they are selling are advertised using Google Adwords… this means it’s costing THEM money to try sell their product. I guarantee you that they are spending more money on the advertising then they are making from the advertising.

3/ If you really had a magic formulae for making tons of money, would you really want to share that with the world?

How much money, realistically, can you make with Google Adsense?
The amount of money you can make with Google Adsense is dependent on a couple things.

1/ How many page views do you get per day/per month on your site. – After researching this long and hard, not to mention owning 9 websites that run Google Adsense, a good average to work on is between 1% – 4% (CTR – Click through rate) of the page views you get will result in a click on an advert. The more page views you therefore get, the more clicks you will get.

2/ How many unique visitors do you get per day/per month – Unique visitors are important since some people just don’t click on adverts, ever. So the more unique people you get onto your site, the more likely you will have someone that will click on an ad.

3/ What is your websites topic? – Certain topics cost more to advertise on Google than others, the more the person paid to have their ad displayed, the more money you will receive from Google if someone clicks on your ad. Having topics that pay higher per click will ultimately result in you making more money.

4/ Ad placement – Although you don’t want to make your website cluttered with ads, it is important to fiddle with different settings and types of ads that you run on your website. There is sadly no magic formula for this and each of my websites behaves differently. On some of my websites standard text adverts work well compared to image and video ads. On some of my other websites the opposite is true. Not only are the type of ads important, but putting them in different places is vital as well. The only way to get this right, try something, leave it for a month or two look at the results then try something else, wait a month or two then compare the two sets of results and start the process again.

So based on the above you can see that it’s very hard to give a straight answer to the question “How much money, realistically, can you make with Google Adsense?” – however, Google shows you what the average amount of money you are currently getting per 1000 pageviews (eCPM – Cost per thousand). Again each of my websites shows totally different stats, some make less than $1 per 1,000 pageviews, others make over $10/ per 1,000. So in the first case if I wanted to make $100 per month, I would need to have over 100,000 page views per month. In the second scenario I would only need 10,000 page views to make $100. In order to generate the above mentioned pageviews in a month would require a lot of work advertising the site, not to mention the amount of good quality content that would be required to attract people to your site. Based on the amount of hours you would invest in doing this for the amount of money you would make in return, you would make more money flipping burgers at McDonalds then you will with Google Adsense.

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I sadly, signed a contract with my old Cell Service Provider just before the iPhone 3G phone came out, and was quite sad that I hadn’t done the research before hand to see its arrival date. However, since I had a 24 month contract with my Cell provider, and the fact that the cancellation penalties were so high, I grinned and bared it and kept my old phone.

The good news, December 23rd my contract was due for expiration, and I had already placed a port request (to move from MTN to Vodacom, since only Vodacom has the rights to sell the iPhone in South Africa) to take place on the 23rd of December so I could finally get the iPhone, and by now of course the even newer version (iPhone 3GS) had been released which was in my favour of course ?

Now I had had many discussions with friends about the iPhone and the hefty price tag attached to the phone, even on a really high monthly package. In South Africa (at time of print of this) the iPhone 3GS 16GB will set you back between R2,000 – R5,000 ON A CONTRACT! There is currently no option to buy it on Pay as you Go, and there is no way to get one for free, regardless of the package that you subscribe to with Vodacom. Vodacom also have a sneaky way of getting you to buy the higher end package. I was previously on a 300 (free minute with per second billing option) which was more than enough for me in most cases. Vodacom however, have a 240 minute package (per MINUTE billing) or you can go for the 500 package which does have per second billing. This pretty much forces you to go for the higher package, and of course a higher monthly cost then I was paying for before.

It was the above reasons why so many of my friends had made the statement, “It’s not worth the money, after all, it’s just a phone”

Well, I took the plunge and decided I would go for it even with the extra cost, and after having the phone for almost a month now, I can confirm, this is NOT “just a phone”. With over 120,000 applications available for the iPhone (A lot of free, but even the paid apps are cheap, mostly been under R8 (£0.59) ($0.99)) it can do pretty much ANYTHING you want it to do.

In conclusion, I don’t think I will ever go for another phone, and certainly recommend the iPhone to anyone in the market for a new phone, and yes, it was worth the wait

Just a warning though, if you do get this phone, expect to spend a few hours a day addicted to it, and constantly looking for new apps and features for it!

City: Johannesburg

Country: South Africa

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What caused the problem? :
I noticed that this occurred shortly after I had installed the new Facebook application update. This new update allows Facebook to search your contacts on your iPhone, compare them to the Facebook database, and then download all your friends profile pictures and attach them to your contacts.

I synced my iPhone to my Outlook (which out of interest is running on Windows Vista), and all my contacts in outlook were updated with their new pictures. All future syncing of my iPhone and Outlook would fail from this point onwards.

The Solution:
After fiddling for hours trying to find the best way to resolve this issue, I did the following

1: Open iTunes
2: Click on ‘Edit – Preferences’
3: Select the ‘Devices’ tab at the top
4: Click on ‘Reset Sync History’
5: Sync your iPhone
6: Smile that your problem has gone away ?

My Setup:

1/ Outlook 2007
2/ Windows Vista Home Edition
3/ iTunes Version 9
4/ iPhone 3GS 16GB

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